Beta Feedback for Pres, and Just General Changes

Classes Evoker
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Posting here because I can’t post in the beta thread for some reason despite having access to beta.

First off…let’s take a moment to recognize the fact in the 30+ posts that are in the Evoker Beta Feedback thread, not a SINGLE one is talking about Pres at the time of me typing this - that alone should say something. That said, here are my recommendations for general Pres changes, and also beta Pres changes.

General Changes/Feedback:
IMO Prevoker underrepresentation can be chalked up to three things

  1. Evoker range
  2. Lack of raid utility
  3. Lack of “passive” damage

Evoker Range - I’m of the opinion that if Blizz wants to make a class with a short range, that’s fine…that said, when Evoker is inside of that range they need to be better at what they do than any other class that can do the same thing. Within the 30yd range of Preservation Evoker, no other healer should have as much raw throughput, period. The Resto Druid with twice my range shouldn’t be doing as much if not more healing than me if I’m able to keep my group in my 30yds.

Lack of Raid Utility - this point is going to seem somewhat argumentative to the first point, but hear me out…throughput matters so much less than utility in a raid environment. Prevoker brings nothing to raid that another healer, or another spec of Evoker can’t do better. We don’t have move speed buffs, raid wide DR, damage buffs, mana restoration, etc. I think the simplest fix for this is to add a line to the end of Zephyr that reads something along the lines of “Preservation: Zephyr affects your entire raid instead of only the 4 closest allies”. This gives you a reason to bring a Prevoker not only in contest with other healers, but over just saying “meh, Aug can do it too and offers more”.

Lack of “passive” damage - I put passive in quotes here because I’m talking about things like DoTs or Nature’s Vigil. The only “passive” damage Prevoker has is Fire Breath; outside of that we just have to spam Living Flame…and if we’re spamming Living Flame for damage, we’re not healing. Devastation Evoker’s have a talent that turns Living Flame into a DoT/HoT and, as far as I’m aware, is never taken because it’s just massively outclassed by the other option in that choice node. My suggestion would be to take that talent and bake it into Lifeforce Mender or just make it baseline for Pres. The DoT would scale based on the damage of the Living Flame, which would give us extra value from Scarlet Adaptation and would give us more up time for healing. Even then, I don’t actually know if Lifeforce Mender would be taken in a raid environment due to point restrictions - which I go into a bit in the beta feedback section.

Beta Feedback:

Hero Talents:
For anyone who has played Prevoker throughout DF, Chronowarden just feels really boring to play…which makes sense since around half the tree is literally just our tier bonuses from DF. I don’t really know how to make it better outside of a complete redesign though; but considering you’ve already nerfed Time Convergence into the ground, you may as well at this point. The entire interaction of the tree effectively revolves around Tip the Scales now, where before it was about using your CDs effectively to have a high uptime on Time Convergence. Chronowarden no longer changes Prevoker gameplay in any meaningful way, as the only real interaction is from a 2m CD. That said, I don’t disagree with the nerf to Time Convergence; when I very first saw that talent I thought “aaah…this either doesn’t make it to live, or Aug and Pres will be forced into Chronowarden specifically because of this talent”.

Flameshaper on the other hand actually feels pretty decent to play as Pres. I don’t actually know how it will stack up against Chronowarden in most environments, but Engulf feels fairly transformative for the spec. It requires a bit of thought on when and how to use it as Pres - did my tank just get chunked and needs a big burst of healing? Is a damage spike about to occur and I can spread my Dream Breath and cause a mini Dream Explosion? Can I pop it on the boss for some extra damage? It feels fairly versatile despite being only a single button. Maybe just give it a nicer animation? I couldn’t even tell if the cast went off the first time I used it…

Reverberations and Titanic Precision feel like they belong on opposite trees. You put the extra HoT talent in the Living Flame tree, and the Living Flame talent in the HoT tree…help me make sense of that one. Alternatively, change Titanic Precision to read “Your abilities that have a chance to trigger Essence Burst have a 100% increased…”, that way Reversion can benefit from the effect as well. It almost feels like this talent was designed BEFORE the Reversion change, and then you guys just forgot that Reversion can now also trigger Essence Burst.

Pres Talents:
Let’s talk about Grace Period for a second…what are we doing here? We nerfed a talent by 5% and then turned it into a capstone? What in the great beyond is that? You keep talking about how you want people to use Reversion more, but then nerf the best reason to use Reversion. And you can’t even use the reasoning that you turned it from a double point node into a single point node because it’s effectively a triple point node now. If you’re going to make something a capstone, at least don’t reduce its power.

Titan’s Gift should be where Ouroboros is, and then shift Ouroboros and Life-Giver’s Flame to the right - or just swap Titan’s Gift and Life-Giver’s Flame. The left side of the tree is the Essence Burst side, adding an Essence Burst talent to the middle of the tree is super awkward…this doesn’t actually change anything because of the connections, but you know…congruency.

Time Lord, Flow State, and Exhilarating Burst should all be single point nodes, and even then I don’t know how many people would actually invest into Flow State or Exhil Burst. There’s a part of me that thinks Fluttering Seedlings should only be a single point node too…but I also think that might be too strong.

You wanted feedback on Talents that felt necessary to pick but didn’t feel fun to pick…Timeless Magic and Essence Attunement. It’s 2024, why are we still making QoL “now stacks twice” talents - just make it baseline blizz, please. Timeless Magic didn’t feel super necessary if you were playing CoL before, but now with the 30% mana reduction baked into the talent, you literally do not have a choice but to take it…and even more so on beta since you locked Grace Period behind it.

I constantly feel like I’m always just one or two points shy of a complete build with the Prevoker talents, and the new Titan’s Gift talent really only exacerbates that.

I can’t speak on the actual power of Prevoker in raid since there’s no raid testing yet, but I’m fairly confident that the current version of beta Prevoker will see the same amount of representation in TWW that it saw in DF.

All that said, I’ve typed up probably way too much here and I’m sure it’ll never get read by a dev anyway - but on the off chance that it does, I hope you guys take some of this into consideration and make some meaningful changes to actually get the representation you want out of Prevoker going into TWW.

Responding to: Feedback: Evokers

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I’d somewhat disagree with this now that pres has access to spatial paradox. The fact that, unlike the DPS specs, pres gives two healers spatial paradox is insanely powerful utility.

Not to say they couldn’t benefit from more, but this is a game changer.

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Giving Spatial Paradox to yourself doesn’t really matter considering the only casted spells for Prevoker are Living Flame and Temporal Anomaly. Combined with the fact that we always have double Hover charges…it just doesn’t matter. You’re still effectively only giving a single healer the ability to move and cast since Evoker basically always has that ability anyway. You could MAYBE make an argument for this if you could use empowered spells during it, but in it’s current form it doesn’t matter. You’re basically just giving yourself a third Hover charge on a 3m CD.

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Doubling your range at the right time is large value even if you ignore casting while moving.

Even if you only gave it to one healer and not yourself, it’s great utility that other healers can’t bring.

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Sure but even that last line you said kind of shows my point. Aug or Dev being able to double the range of another healer and give them Spirit Walkers has more value than a Prevoker doing the same thing - since all they’re effectively doing is giving themselves a normal healer’s range for 10s. And even then, since you’re likely using it during a period of time when you have to move, you’re effectively only doubling the range of Reversion, Living Flame, and Emerald Blossom. Temporal Anomaly doesn’t go further, Dream Breath doesn’t get bigger, and neither Dream Breath nor Spiritbloom can be cast while moving. I’m not disagreeing that it’s a good pickup, but it’s not going to justify bringing a Pres over an Aug just for Spatial Paradox.

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“Normal” healers do not have a sixty yard range…

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Sure, I was exaggerating for effect…regardless, a single healer with a 80yd range and Spirit Walkers for 10s on a 3m CD and an Aug will still out value a healer with a 80yd range and Spirit Walkers and a Prevoker with a 60yd range for 10s on a 3m CD.

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That’s far too comp and encounter specific to really claim at this point but we’d just be splitting hairs to take this one further down the rabbit hole.

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Why do augs or dev have more value? You’re assuming they will be meta dps. (Aug probably will due to how it’s designed, but dev? lol.)

Like Windwalker monks would be taken if mistweaver and brewmaster didn’t exist (in previous tiers.)

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It’s more the point that Pres doesn’t offer anything Dev or Aug doesn’t. So if you need something from an Evoker, you’re more likely to take a Dev or Aug over a Pres since you have more wiggle room with your DPS classes. Nothing to do with Dev being particularly valuable.

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That starts with the assumption that pres is bad.

They ran 2x pres in VOTI.

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And in Amirdrassil, if you were to include all logs from both 10.2 and 10.2.5 there were fewer Prevokers than there were the next lowest brought healer (Resto Sham) in just 10.2 alone. Prevoker had a total of ~15k logs in both patches combined, and Resto Sham had ~19k in just 10.2. Using isolated data points to help prove our points is fun.

Blizzard overtly stated, word for word, that Prevoker is being underrepresented and they want to do something about it. My post here is to tell them how I think they could make changes to fix that issue, as well as things that I think should be changed on the beta version of Prevoker.

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I just wanna jump in and say that making Zephyr raidwide would make them OP on that spell alone.

It would be PW:Barrier with a movespeed buff that dosent require stacking.

Honestly I think Prevoker is pretty strong, its biggest issue is range in certain fights.

Also our tier set in the beta is gigabad, like the way it is right now we wont even go for 4p.

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I think you’ll find that even Blizzard doesn’t know what is considered “AoE damage”. In a lot of cases spells that affect the entire raid are still considered single target damage, just affecting multiple people at once.

Pres’ range has little to nothing to do with why they stopped being brought to raid. If it was only certain fights where the range was an issue you would still see representation on fights with smaller boss rooms, or on fights where the large boss room isn’t utilized. Larodar is a good example of this since at all points the entire raid is within your range as Pres - despite this, every class does either the same or more HPS than Pres. Combine that with Pres’s lower passive damage and zero utility, how do you justify Pres as being “pretty strong”?

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Yeah it’s weird. I guess the idea is to lifebind a bunch and then reversion someone? Does the 200% apply to an echoed reversion on ptr? Like can you echo ramp, lifebind, echo someone, reversion for really big double reversion?

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Old post but I just saw it from latest bumps

Log out from the forums completely, relaunch browser and re-login, beta forums will work.

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The 200% does not currently apply to any echoed Reversions. But I also don’t think it’s worth playing around the tier set - you’re basically just getting a stronger Reversion after using VE to boost your Dream Breath.

Also, if I’m being completely honest I don’t think the set is as bad as everyone is making it out to be. All of the healer sets don’t seem particularly strong, and I think it’s because they’re doing what they did in DF where the first set is intentionally weaker for the sake of determining the overall balance of the classes. Most of the healing sets are basically just “x does 5-10% more healing”. I think the 2 piece needs a numbers change, but I think the 4 piece feeds into the 2 piece really well.

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If that is the intended play style is actually is completely garbage lol. I don’t think that would be optimal at all. Pretty sure using the echos to lifebind for an 40% aoe 200% reversion would be way more HPS. I’m not thrilled with that as the current tier seems way better but meh.

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Oh don’t get me wrong, I think that would be way cooler…but I also don’t think Blizz ever intended for it to work that way sadly. Like I said, I get the feeling this is just going to be a toned down tier like the first set in DF.